Fiction, thoughts and creative writing by Rachel Carter

Anxiety Roulette

I want to talk about how it’s not a thing you can easily control with thoughts and actions and practices.

I want to talk about how all the pep talks and encouragement in the world don’t always help. Sometimes they make things worse.

I want to talk about how the fight against anxiety is often a bad fight, a futile fight.

I want to tell you it’s not about attitude. There’s nothing wrong with my attitude.

I want to ask you please not to tell me not to worry, not to tell me it’ll all be okay, not to tell me I’ll enjoy it if I try, not to tell me I’ll be glad I did something, not to tell me “Well done” when I walk through hell and come out the other side, weak, dizzy and exhausted, with bits missing and reduced power.

I want to ask you to please not write me off either. Don’t think you know what I’m capable of or not capable of. Don’t assume I can’t or won’t. Let me decide.

I want you to know how much I love films and theatre and concerts and loud music and dressing up for parties and dancing and laughing and coming home late in a taxi thrilled by the feel of nylon instead of jeans on my smooth legs, and the soft fade of twenty perfumes around my head from all the familiar faces I kissed in greetings and goodbyes. I want to tell you how much occasion moves me and fills me with the joy of experience. I want to tell you how good it is to catch up with old friends and grin into eyes I love and to feel the energising give and take of a fond squeeze.
I want to tell you how beauty and being Out There, and filling all my senses with both new and familiar experiences and making a record of my life makes me feel alive. I want you to know I am fun. I am.

I want to tell you how, despite knowing everything will be okay and knowing my destination and my love for what I will be doing, that sometimes I hurt too much to see it through. That I hurt before I go, I hurt as I get ready, I hurt as I walk through a door, or leave the safety of our home or our car. I hurt when I see many faces. I hurt when I already know this isn’t going well. And on those occasions I will not be glad I went. And sometimes I will genuinely wish I hadn’t or be glad I didn’t just because I needed the pain to stop.

But instead, I’ll give you an example, and hope that will make you understand – or at least make you realise you understand less than you thought and that you need to understand more.

Yesterday we went to the cinema. I and three of my safe people. Safe people are people I can see whatever kind of day I’m having. In my case it’s my husband and children. We went to our usual, familiar cinema. I said what and where and when, and had booked seats in advance the day before and pictured where we would be sitting. I then got on with my life, pre-event. We went shopping and for a walk and I made dinner and did gentle yoga. I went to bed at a sensible time and I got up and did more gentle yoga. I showered and dressed in the usual way and got myself ready to leave the house. But anxiety had been waiting, and as I got ready, it began to hurt me. I felt pain in my chest, and by time we were in the car I felt pain in my upper arms. As we got out of the car and walked through town, I began to feel weak. This simple everyday event was something I should have felt entirely comfortable with, in theory, and yet I was getting all my usual symptoms of fear.
We met our eldest daughter and the four of us killed a bit of time before the film started but all the while I was looking forward to sitting down in the dark, and being out of this anticipatory phase.

The film was Bohemian Rhapsody. It was loud and entertaining and distracting. It tugged at my emotions, the music lifted the pain in my chest. I was taken back in time and really felt absorbed as music memories were triggered.
I am musical. Music used to play a huge part in my life. I was always singing, playing, performing, practising when I was young. Music always lifts me. Loud music that I can feel in my chest is medicine to me. I related to the quirky creative performer that was Freddie Mercury.

When the film was over and I was still high from the music, I talked about 1984 and Live Aid and the impression it had on a then 14-year-old me. My words weren’t formed properly and I stumbled. I think I got away with it because we were walking out of the building and I was up against other voices. But already I knew I’d exhausted myself.

At home we walked the dogs quickly as the sun set and I felt a strong desire to be still and do nothing but stare at the sky but we rushed home and I cooked the evening meal. My legs began to feel weak and my arms shook. No one noticed. It’s something I’ve had to hide all my life. I began to forget why I’d walked to the left to fetch a spoon or what I was going to do next. I can only explain this is a feeling of shutting down.

I felt dizzy. I felt weak. I felt symptoms commonly associated with hunger but eating didn’t make me feel better.

I didn’t help clear up after the meal. I went upstairs to change and collapsed on the bed. All the pain had stopped (although it’s back now for some reason) but I was left feeling absolutely exhausted. In theory though I shouldn’t have been tired.
The night before I had slept well. Really well. It had been my best night’s sleep of the year. I had absorbed the extra hour of the clocks going back and woken with a smile before doing yoga.

I am glad I did what I did yesterday. I don’t always know when or how much anxiety will strike. I don’t know how much it will affect my faculties. I do still want to plan and look forward to stuff and try to have fun. But anxiety is draining. It sucks the life out of me. If I do something small it’s bigger than your 2 activities, than your 3 activities. My trip to the cinema is bigger than your flight to Morocco or your 60th birthday party. I’m not entirely happy with that knowledge.

Today I will have an anxiety hangover and have to limit what I do and what I put my brain through. My husband won’t understand. Why should he? So I’ll just be slow and useless and boring and feel like a complete disappointment.

When I’m better I will plan something else.
And hope that anxiety can’t be bothered to play up. My trick of distracting myself sometimes works, sometimes it doesn’t. My trick of thinking ahead and making sure I know exactly how things will go sometimes helps and sometimes it doesn’t.
If anxiety does want to play I will have the usual choices:
Cancel?
Get as far as the event and either embarrass myself or run away or both?
Plough through the pain and hope the anxiety fades?
Go but regret it?
Spend the next few days doing nothing while my body recovers?
Get through relatively unscathed and be happy?

Maybe it will be worth it. Maybe it won’t.
I can’t call it. You can’t call it. But I’ll never write myself off or decide that I’m not doing anything again. I just have to pace myself.

So please don’t ever tell an anxious person they’ll be glad they did it. Please don’t tell me “Well done!” when I’m actually done in and uncertain. Each time is different and sometimes getting through was the wrong decision. The power of anxiety to trash events and lives is more complicated than you might think.

And please, please, please don’t write us off, don’t cross us off your list. We need things to look forward to and we need our capabilities noted.

Oh, and did that extreme exhaustion mean I slept well last night? Hell, no… adrenalin and cortisol poison my sleep patterns and haunt my nights.

Like this:

Rachel, all I can say is I agree. I know exactly what you mean. You could be describing me. Anxiety is an exhausting and unpredictable stalker. Sometimes we give it the slip, other times we don’t. Take care of yourself. And thanks for this wonderful and honest post. It has helped me to read it.

What I write about:

Search this blog:

Search

About me and this blog

Hi. Welcome to a Voice Released.
I started this blog in 2009 to blog my creative writing. It soon became clear I was using it as a form of communication, for not only was I freeing the voices of the characters I created but I had freed my own voice and was learning to share my thoughts and feelings in a way I had found inexplicably difficult through speech alone.
Along with several tiny flash fiction and other short stories I have written over the years, I have blogged about the struggles with anxiety and the discovery more recently that I am in fact autistic.
I was diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder in April 2014, and told that this was the condition formally described as Asperger’s Syndrome. Put simply I am autistic but in a less visible way. It is this very invisibility that prompts me to keep writing about the hidden struggles of Aspies, autistics and undiagnosed autistic people, and to share concerns and often very difficult moments and confusions that can hit us sometimes and leave us feeling all at sea and alone in the world.
I’ve always been obsessed with people, interactions and behaviours. I love to tell stories from the points of view of the characters who visit my head – particularly the misunderstood. I also like to have a rant now and then about society. Sometimes I combine the two!
Having autism and anxiety means that, even though it’s not obvious, I’m always working, always exhausted, always using too much adrenalin and cortisol, and always looking for ways to find peace, to reach out and to manage my health. Writing seems to cover all of these things and brings the satisfaction of creative production and a much needed release of creative energy.
In my other life I run a shop with my husband. He does the people stuff and I do the paper, organising and money stuff. I also have an organic vegetable garden and try to grow and cook as much of my own produce as possible and grow plenty of things for bees and butterflies, while trying to run a home and be a good enough mum to three children between the ages of 11 and 21. I insist on fitting photography into that mix too and force myself to take at least one photo every day. I keep a journal for that on blipfoto.

If you’re interested in my autism discovery and assessment, the blog entries between February and April 2014 would be a good place to start.

About Us

Did you know you can write your own about section just like this one? It's really easy. Navigate to Appearance → Widgets and create a new Text Widget. Now move it to the Footer 1 sidebar.

A wonderful serenity has taken possession of my entire soul, like these sweet mornings of spring which I enjoy with my whole heart. I am alone, and feel the charm of existence in this spot, which was created for the bliss of souls like mine. I am so happy, my dear friend, so absorbed in the exquisite sense of mere tranquil existence, that I neglect my talents. I should be incapable of drawing a single stroke at the present moment; and yet I feel that I never was a greater artist than now.